Money, candidates, and “a lot of blocking and tackling”
Contacts in Florida have said for some time that the Florida Democratic Party was all but dead. And dead broke. Any leadership was coming out of Hillsborough County (Tampa), still active and well-organized under Ione Townsend. The election in February to “the worst job in state politics” of former state agriculture commissioner Nikki Fried as state chair may signal revival. Fried promptly got herself arrested along with Lauren Book, Florida’s senate minority leader, in a protest against Florida’s six-week abortion ban.
So, signs of life. And a little fight.
Over at The Bulwark today, consultant Steve Shale recounts, in his view, the decade of mistakes that led to Ron DeSantis. (I have not had time to check with Florida insiders for their take, so read on with that caveat.)
An outside donor group in 2009 decided it would “supplement to the work of the state party” and construct a “long-term progressive infrastructure” built on the Obama organizing model. They were convinced Obama’s election represented “an ideological shift in the country.” What the “supplement” accomplished over time, Shale argues, was a hollowing out of the state party:
In 2018, while most of the country had a good night for Democrats, we saw two statewide losses by less than 0.5 percent. A ton of money was spent by the outside, but once again, the party-centric coordinated effort was underfunded because the donors’ alliance had functionally replaced the state party as the focus.
In 2020, an outside organization spent over $10 million on a completely fruitless and badly conceived plan to try to take back the state House—while the Republicans were organizing on the ground, registering voters, recruiting good candidates, and playing in seats they could realistically win.
Since mechanics and logistics are my area of focus, this section hit home:
Elections are determined by lots of inputs. There’s the political and economic environment. The money. The candidates, their stories, and their visions. There are external shocks and events. There’s luck. But there’s also a lot of blocking and tackling, the kind of routine, unglamorous work that political professionals do in order to maximize a campaign’s chances of success.
Unless you’re in a very favorable race, you can’t win if the only thing you have going for you is the blocking and tackling. But by the same token, if you’re in a competitive race, trying to win without that basic blocking and tackling is asking every other factor to break your way.
And while it’s not sexy, these routine mechanics of electioneering—the blocking and tackling of politics—are something Republicans in this state do very well on a year-round basis. This is why we have an overwhelmingly re-elected Ron DeSantis and his Free State of Florida, while my state’s Democratic party is barely hanging on life support.
The alliance enticed regular donors away from the party, leaving it underesourced and struggling. Kinda what vouchers and charter schools do to public education.
Shale writes, “Today, Democrats in Montana have a larger share of seats in their legislative chambers than Democrats in Florida do.”